Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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I don’t want to watch Human Centipede II. But I want the right to watch it

I can't understand why there isn't more outrage over the BBFC's banning of Human Centipede II (Full Sequence). Like me, you probably weren't planning to rush out and buy a DVD of this movie, which tells the lovely story of a bloke who stitches 12 people together to create the eponymous beast while pleasuring himself with sandpaper and barbed wire. But you should nonetheless be angry at the BBFC's blanket ban on the film, its unilateral removal of our right to decide for ourselves whether to watch it or to snub it. Because it sums up brilliantly the tyrannical elitism of censorship and the BBFC's treatment of the public as potential perverts who are only one sick movie away from going completely mental.

The BBFC justified its ban on the basis that the film, with its scenes of "graphic sexual violence", poses a "real risk" of causing "harm" to potential viewers. Apparently the film could "deprave or corrupt a significant proportion of those likely to see [it]". Which immediately raises a question in my mind: why did it not warp the minds and morality of the men and women at the BBFC who, poor souls that they are, had to sit through it? Are they now depraved? Have they been corrupted? Why not? What is so special about them which means that they are capable of watching the two-hour-long fictional creation of a sexual monster without going doolally, whereas the general public – you and I – apparently are not?

This captures the elitism of the BBFC, and of the bossy, self-appointed censoring class in general, which clearly considers itself morally superior, possessed of a stronger stomach and a clearer mind, than the ordinary man in the street. Normally such elitism is well disguised, hidden behind claims that censorship must be enforced to "protect the children" or to "preserve national security". But here, in the unfettered blacklisting of a film that might deprave and corrupt "even adults", in the words of the BBFC, we can see the snobbish authoritarianism of Britain's chief censors in all its unglory. The message of their ban is: We, the incorruptible few, have a duty to protect you, the corruptible mass, from your worst, most depraved instincts.

The elitism of the BBFC is also revealed in the fact that it is more likely to pass sexually violent movies if they are aimed at arthouse audiences (nice people) rather than the average Joe (frightfully unpredictable weirdos). So in 2009 it granted a cinema release to Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, which also features wacky sexual degradation. (I won't go into detail, but there are scissors, hammers, private parts and a lot of blood.) One reviewer called it the "sickest" movie ever to receive the BBFC's nod of approval. But our moral superiors were happy to release that film – alongside various other French and Japanese art movies with explicit sex and violence – because they trusted that only people like them, the decent, upstanding middle classes, are likely to go to the ICA to watch it. As censorship expert Tom Dewe Matthews has argued, the BBFC “has a bias in favour of arthouse audiences”.

The lack of outrage over the banning of Human Centipede II has been put down to its grotesque content. A Guardian writer said that when she read about the content of the film, she could feel her “anti-censorship inclinations shrivel up along with my appetite”. But it is a mistake to give a green light to the BBFC’s actions just because the film it has banned sounds demented. Because the issue is not whether or not you want to watch this film, but whether you should have the right to decide for yourself whether or not to watch it. In banning this movie, the BBFC has overridden my adult moral faculties; it has removed from me my freedom to choose, my ability to make a moral decision in relation to a piece of art (or trash, or gore, or whatever you want to call it). It has turned me into a child whose eyes must be shielded from fictional horrors. I would far rather live in a world in which some shops sold crazy films featuring human centipedes, than a world in which people I have never met and never voted for and about whom I know next to nothing take it upon themselves to act in loco parentis on my behalf.